Pirate Tales

In the imaginations of young and old alike, the word “pirate” resonates with spine-tingling fear and swashbuckling adventure. Over centuries, our cultural landscape has been populated by a host of famous real and fictional figures immortalized in literature and art: Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, with his fearsome reputation for cruelty; Henry ‘Bloody' Morgan, whose treasure is still sought today; and of course Long John Silver, the archetypal anti-hero of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1885).

Pirate Tales gathers a treasure trove of excerpts from literary works inspired by the historical pirates of the 16th and 17th centuries. The edition begins with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), a book containing all the trappings of pirate lore – shipwrecks, mutineers, undiscovered islands, and talking parrots – and one which influenced hundreds of works of adventure fiction, not least Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1871).